High Scores: Pyramid Peril
James Davis
Cuphead is a deeply referential game, so full of references—to jazz and ragtime, to early film animation, and to other video games—that I’m positive most of them are zipping over my head. But one reference that stands out clearly and unites the game’s 1930s musical and filmic references is the character of King Dice, who is obviously made in the image of Cab Calloway. He even says “hi-de-ho” at one point to make the inspiration crystal clear.
Players who catch the reference still might not know that Cab Calloway starred in the 1932 Betty Boop cartoon “Minnie the Moocher,” as well as two other Boops. (I didn’t know until researching for this essay.) And when I say “starred,” I mean he appears onscreen, along with his orchestra, in live action, for the first thirty to forty-five seconds of the films. We’re shown Calloway the man—his showmanship, his talent, and those of the eleven Black musicians who accompany him—before the film becomes a cartoon and Calloway becomes, in the case of “Minnie the Moocher,” a very graceful walrus.
These live-action introductions have no bearing on the story; they’re included to celebrate Calloway and his orchestra, to quite literally bring them into the film. They imply a degree of collaboration between Calloway and Max Fleischer, the film’s director. Seeing Calloway dance at the film’s beginning gives the rotoscoped walrus caricature needed context. And it confronts the white audience with the image of a man who, in the year of the film’s release, could not have sat in the same row of the theater as them in much of the United States.
While Calloway doesn’t seem to have lent his voice or image to any future cartoons, he was repeatedly caricatured in cartoons after 1932, some with such telling names as “Bosko and the Cannibals” or “Korn Plastered in Africa.” One aspect of Cuphead that makes me uneasy is that it aims to painstakingly recreate a cartoon style from an era when cartoons were often reckless in their depiction and use of nonwhite cultures. Cuphead mostly avoids such insensitivity, but it does have one level that makes me cringe, in ways that feel familiar from both cartoons and video games.
In the stage in question, Pyramid Peril, the player fights Djimmi the Great, a genie, against a desert backdrop, firing artillery and dropping bombs from little WWII-era fighter planes. Djimmi produces a treasure-spewing chest held aloft on a magic carpet. He transforms into sandstone pillars, a sarcophagus, and finally a gigantic, red, vaguely humanoid spirit who fires energy waves from his turban’s central ruby. He sits midair with his legs in a lotus position; his shoes are little magic lamps. If you gain enough power, you can nuke him.
None of this really bothered me on my first playthrough, which speaks to my conditioning. I am used to genies in games and cartoons, as two-dimensional stock villains and sidekicks. I am used to cute cartoon characters wreaking havoc on vaguely Egyptian lands without any real consequences. It wasn’t until a friend and veteran of Afghanistan shared his discomfort with the level design that I considered the Djimmi fight anything other than a rather clever take on an old theme. Replaying with my friend’s words and experiences in my head, the violence felt less cartoony. It would be one thing if this were a ground battle, but the fact that the game puts you in the air to bombard the artifacts and architecture of a pastiche of African and Asian cultures feels referential in a way the developers didn’t intend.
“Desert” or “Egyptian” has been a go-to artistic theme for video games since at least the US Super Mario Bros. 2’s Japanese source game, Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic. The theme has inspired some iconic level design elements, like the angry sun stage in SMB 3, and some beautiful music, like “Gerudo Valley” from Ocarina of Time or “Desert Oasis” from King’s Quest V. In fact, “Pyramid Peril,” the song that scores Djimmi’s level, is beautiful. It’s the favorite of the soundtrack’s composer, Kristofer Maddigan, as he detailed in this 2019 lecture. But in light of the level design, “Pyramid Peril” may sound more like parody than appreciation of the cultures it borrows from. Like so many mummy movies, video games have tended to treat wide swaths of Africa and Asia as essentially identical, ancient sites for excavation and plunder. Characters representing these cultures are crude and flat. I’m thinking of The Great Tiger in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! or Vizier Abdul Alhazred in King’s Quest VI. Worse, games can completely ignore the living owners of borrowed cultures, as the developers of Mega Man V did with Napalm Man, a character and level design that led to an understandable ban on the game in Vietnam. In the pursuit of a theme, it’s easy for artists to fall back on harmful tropes and repeat harmful narratives.
“Pyramid Peril” is an appropriate song to spotlight, not only because it’s Maddigan’s favorite but also because it speaks to the game’s opportunities—and its perils. For an indie game, Cuphead has had an amazingly wide reach, which is sure to continue growing. It has sold five million copies on Steam alone. Netflix has already teased a Cuphead cartoon, starring Wayne Brady as King Dice. (It should be said—often—that the original voice of King Dice is Alana Bridgewater, an incredibly talented vocalist based in Ontario. Listen to her non-King Dice work on her YouTube channel to get an idea of how remarkable her vocal transformation is.) What do its creators want to do with this reach besides entertain? Clearly, Maddigan wants to honor the Black composers and performers who inspired the game’s music: Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Calloway, Louis Armstrong, the Nicholas Brothers. Will the cartoon make Joplin and Ellington visible in the way it does Calloway? Will there be Black human characters, as there are white ones in the game? How will living Black artists contribute to the creation of its music and story? Will Djimmi be included in the cartoon, and if so, how will he be depicted in light of the worsening crisis in Afghanistan? How can the game or its spinoff show work against imperialist tropes of conquest and destruction in the Global South?
That may be asking a lot of a cartoon or a video game, but if any title proves that video games are an artform, it’s Cuphead. It is a magical, transformative game that somehow feels like a peer to the cartoons of the 1930s, not merely an homage. It obsessed me, as the best games do. I got a 200% completion rate and every achievement badge. I died 1,186 times. I couldn’t—can’t—shut up about it. I believe its creators, the Moldenhauer brothers, have not only the power to refer to and celebrate a culture’s history; they have the power to change the culture, to influence the way games, cartoons, and music are made. The devs were meticulous in so many details of the game design, from the hand-drawn lettering of the games’ text boxes to the solvable, rotating 3D maze model in the background of Djimmi the Great’s stage. Their attention to America’s darker histories could be just as thoughtful.